Hmm so all the more liberal/secular states are in happy happy land, and all the hardcore bible thumping conservative states are unhappy? Curious... why is that? You would think all those people loving Jesus, hating gays, loving their guns, and blaming Obama for the worlds ills would be happier?

Yes, "No one loves me" could be counted as a happy tweet, while "I'd hate to live anywhere else" could be counted as negative, but on average, these words are going to correlate with happiness or unhappiness. Coming up with specific examples that belie the usual context of the word does not mean the entire methodology is useless.

Heist:Yes, "No one loves me" could be counted as a happy tweet, while "I'd hate to live anywhere else" could be counted as negative, but on average, these words are going to correlate with happiness or unhappiness. Coming up with specific examples that belie the usual context of the word does not mean the entire methodology is useless.

Sure, not useless, but substantially flawed. A word is meaningless without context, and there was no way to determine context. So slightly better than throwing darts at a dartboard, but not much.

Arkanaut:I'm surprised Maine is so happy. Stephen King really sells them short.

I've been to Maine. I have family in Maine. Much of my family comes from Maine.

They're happy because they're busy, patriotic, religious, dumb, and ignorant. Also, their Yankee accent is so thick even people from Boston can't disabuse them of their quasi-insane delusions of superiority.

I think it's something they put in the beer. Probably the THC.

Another hypothesis: the more time people have on their hands, the happier they are. Rank the States by the amount of time people have on their hands and then compare to the map.

And also consider that old people are ridiculously happy compared to people who have to work for a living.

Old + leisured + WASP + dumb + religious + conservative = happy

Hawaii, Nevada, Maine, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Florida. Get the picture?

Notice that the least happy places are in the South and the De-industrialized Middle America states.

Mind you, the fact that this is based on Twitter accounts biases the study towards people who have too much time on their hands and are twits. This may explain why Washington, DC; Massachusetts; and Connecticut score badly. There are a lot of rich and smart people in these three places, and nobody has time to tweet.

According to the article, Louisiana is one of the absolutely most sad places because folks here use a lot of curse words? Lately I've read that people who swear are more trustworthy and have less pain. Also, folks in Louisiana tweet curse words because we feel free to do so. Let's see, feelings of being free, trustworthy and with less pain? Also with good food and drinks. That study is farking ridiculous.

Yeah, the methodology on this study is pretty weak and I wouldn't take any of it as gospel, but it's still an interesting exercise and an example of the sort of thing that's possible now that services like twitter are around and established.

A colleague near me is doing some pretty neat research involving data mining 70 years of newspaper articles that were OCR'd for sentiment analysis about a bunch of topics. So you could see the general "tone" with which things like civil rights movement, military actions, different political issues and such were discussed in articles about them shifted over time. His work seems to be catching the interest of a lot of groups, although personally I just like it as a novelty and source of sliding commentary about our human condition.

His team was starting to dive into Twitter more rigorously to see what they could see, but as others pointed out above there's a slew of caveats and shortcomings given the modern quirks and colloquialisms (eg most swear words are ambiguously good or bad when used as adjectives and adverbs, etc) and it sounds like the researchers in TFA would've been well suited to implement even a modicum of phrase parsing to catch things like "the shiat" vs. just shiat.

But still, will be fun going forward to see data fall out of these sorts of "passive" services and how that compares to results Gallup gets from knocking on doors and asking questions. People answering questions more honestly than they ever would, just via their behavior on services like these, no actual asking necessary.

Baelz:Hmm so all the more liberal/secular states are in happy happy land, and all the hardcore bible thumping conservative states are unhappy? Curious... why is that? You would think all those people loving Jesus, hating gays, loving their guns, and blaming Obama for the worlds ills would be happier?

Yeah, nothing says bible thumping and hating gays like New farking Orleans. Or did you not see how miserable it lists LA?

InmanRoshi:Abstruse: InmanRoshi: The Beaumont/Texas City/Port Arthur area seems to be exceptionally unhappy, and this should surprise no one.[numerogroup.files.wordpress.com image 681x510]

That's about as scenic as the Golden Triangle area gets.

It can't be good when the view outside your window is indistinguishable from the movie adaptation of The Road.

Try living here. Hell, I don't even live in Beaumont or Port Arthur. I live in Orange, the crappiest of the three "cities" in the area. It's too hot to go outside for more than a few minutes 9 months out of the year and the other three it rains 3 out of every 7 days. All the bars here are dives (I don't mean hipster "dives", I mean crack/methheads live in the parking lot dives). All the restaurants are either chains like Chili's or complete crap. The movie theater (which hasn't been renovated aside from repairing hurricane damage since the 90s) has a policy not to show any R-rated films ever...unless they're torture porn staring Jesus, then it plays for 3 months straight. One out of every three buildings is a crumbling ruin after Hurricanes Ike and Rita and no one's bothering to clean them up. There's four restaurants where you sit down and order food from a waiter that aren't crappy cookie-cutter TexMex, and one of those is a Chili's.That's not counting the dozen or so crappy TexMex and Chinese buffets that have been shut down at least thrice each for health code violations. The only career paths in this town are work at the chemical plants, work at the underfunded hospital that treats all the long-term health problems the chemical plant workers tend to get, or lawyers to sue the chemical plants over the long-term health problems. Oh, and defend meth heads and crackwhores when they get arrested.

We don't even have a friggin' Starbucks! But there are eight liquor stores. Because you kind of have to stay drunk to keep your sanity living here.

Abstruse:The only career paths in this town are work at the chemical plants, work at the underfunded hospital that treats all the long-term health problems the chemical plant workers tend to get, or lawyers to sue the chemical plants over the long-term health problems.

A sad existence we southeast Texans live, don't we?

I vowed from a very young age to never EVER work in one of those death traps. Living near them surely isn't much better though.